In what year did the Titanic sink?

1912 - struck at 11:40pm on 14 April and gone by 2:20am on the 15th, in two hours and forty minutes. About 1,500 of the 2,224 aboard died, and the lifeboats had places for around 1,178, which was more than the regulations demanded. Those regulations set boat capacity by the ship's tonnage rather than by the number of people carried, and had not been revised since 1894.

The failure was cumulative rather than singular. Ice warnings were received and not all reached the bridge; the ship was near full speed through a known ice field on a moonless, flat-calm night, which is the worst possible condition for spotting bergs because there is no surf breaking at their base; and several early boats left less than half full because officers doubted the davits would take the weight.

What followed changed the rules. Lifeboats for everybody aboard, 24-hour radio watches, and the International Ice Patrol, which still monitors berg drift in the North Atlantic and has been doing so ever since. The nearest ship that night was about ten miles away and had shut down its wireless for the night, which is precisely the gap the new rules closed.